Arch Linux

tladuke

Member

Registered: 2009-07-23

Posts: 176

lm_sensors, temp too high, fans too slow.

I'm trying to go through the Fan Speed wiki article.
%sensors

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +46.0°C  (crit = +115.0°C)
temp2:        +69.0°C  (crit = +105.0°C)
temp3:        +36.7°C  (crit = +112.0°C)
temp4:        +79.0°C  (crit = +112.0°C)
temp5:        +50.0°C  (crit = +90.0°C)
temp6:        +16.0°C  (crit = +112.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:       +71.0°C  (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0001
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 1:       +70.0°C  (high = +105.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

The wiki says:

The first line of the sensors output is the chipset your motherboard uses to read the speeds/temps/voltages.
Create your libsensors configuration file by copying the default libsensors' configuration file to /etc/sensors.d/

But nothing in my /etc/sensors.d/sensors.conf matches anything in the output of sensors.

%uname -a

Linux archbook 2.6.38-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Mar 30 08:47:36 CEST 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Computer is an HP EliteBook 8530w. I'm trying to look through the lm_sensors site, but it's all pretty low level for me. I don't see anything about HP computers. I started looking in to this because sometime in the recent past, -it seems like- my fans stopped spinning fast enough and laptop is heating up and my cpu freqs are getting throttled.  My current solution is to point a little fan at my computer.

running sensors-detect makes an lm_sensors file with:

HWMON_MODULES="coretemp"

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fan_Speed_Control
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lm_sensors
http://www.lm-sensors.org/

Last edited by tladuke (2011-04-19 00:53:02)

fphillips

Member

From: Austin, TX

Registered: 2009-01-24

Posts: 202

Re: lm_sensors, temp too high, fans too slow.

Laptops normally handle this automatically - there is nothing to adjust. Check your bios settings.

So you have "acpitz" and "coretemp". The former is the kernel ACPI thermal driver (modinfo thermal). The latter is for the sensor inside your Intel cpu.
You have no dedicated sensor chip, so forget about pwmconfig/fancontrol. They won't work without one.

You might try the parameters shown in modinfo thermal and look in /proc/acpi, load fan module, install extra/acpi and run acpi -V.
You should be able to see some info in /sys/devices/virtual/thermal and /sys/module/thermal/parameters.

Other thoughts:
- Heatsink full of dust and junk
- thermal connection to heatsink is worn out
- ask for help on linux-acpi (have acpidump ready).
   They do development there, but they will help if you do the legwork.